When Chidera Eggerue hit post on an Instagram photo of herself wearing a “really cute” yellow minidress at a party, she didn’t realise she had just started a global movement.
23-year-old Eggerue — who’s also known by her blogger pseudonym The Slumflower — had been sifting through her photos taken the night before when she noticed her boobs looked “saggy.” “It was a deep plunge neckline so it meant you could see the posture of my boobs,” says Eggerue.
She liked all the photos she’d taken because she “looked so happy,” so she decided to upload one. “But then I noticed that my boobs were saggy and I knew that people might feel a certain way about it.”
In her caption, she wrote about how women’s bodies are viewed and she signed off with something she’d come up with on the spot.
“Somehow I chose to enter on the caption #SaggyBoobsMatter,” says Eggerue. “I didn’t know at the time that I was starting a movement, I was just expressing that saggy boobs actually matter.”
In that moment, she decided she would start talking about this more often. “Anytime I wore something that was a bit revealing I’d use that hashtag in order to continue the conversation,” she says. The Slumflower’s hashtag acted as a call to action to thousands of other women with saggy breasts.
Through the stories shared by others, she learned a lot about how people — particularly women —see themselves. “Women are taught that our value and our ability to be loved is wrapped around how appealing, attractive, and desirable we are.
That idea is so flawed. being worthy of love is nothing to do with what your body looks like. it’s literally the least important thing.
“First of all saggy boobs aren’t even represented at all. And secondly, most women have boobs that aren’t perky,” says Eggerue. “That means there’s a whole conversation that needs to be had about women’s bodies, and more importantly how we see our own selves.”
Well, Eggerue is making that conversation happen right now with her just-released book What A Time To Be Alone — a book which aims to help people evaluate and embrace their own self-worth.
In the book, The Slumflower uses the wisdom imparted by her Nigerian mother to teach others important lessons about finding, and holding onto, self-worth. Leafing through the book, you’ll read statements that nigh-on every young person on the planet needs to engrave onto their brain in 2018.
Things like: “You are not here for anybody’s consumption or amusement”; “You are allowed to change your mind about how you feel about other people”; and “When it comes to healing, take as LONG as you need to get over it. To grow past it. To no longer let it have power over you.”
Peppered throughout are the insightful Igbo proverbs that Eggerue grew up hearing from her mother. Eggerue says that we can learn a lot about self-care and self-worth from Nigerian people.
“What we can all learn from Nigerian people is just prioritising minding your business — something that’s really important” she says. “Minding your business isn’t just staying out of gossip, it’s also focusing on yourself.”
Eggerue says one of the Igbo proverbs in the book perfectly illustrates this important life lesson: “He who is asking for the same haircut as John; does he have the same shaped head as John?” The lesson here, says Eggerue, is to always “focus on your head shape and your haircut,” to stay focused on your own individual experience.
Another nugget of Igbo wisdom is: “When the rat follows the lizard out into the rain, it’s only the rat that gets soaked.” This, too, circles back to minding one’s own business.
“Again, mind your business, do it your way, stop following people around or trying to receive the same outcome someone else has gotten,” says Eggerue. “Their life is shaped differently to yours.”
Eggerue says these proverbs are an important addition to the “guide to why you’re already enough” because they provide millennials with “a connection to how people used to communicate way before we arrived.” Proof, perhaps, that some of life’s most valuable lessons transcend generational and geographic divides.
Through minding your business and dedicating this time and energy instead to spending time alone, you’ll be able get to know yourself better and “investigate certain qualities and flaws that you have.”
“If you know yourself and you know who you are, it’s the most important aspect of self-care,” says Eggerue. “That is what guides the way of how I choose to handle certain situations.
“We could all do with minding our business a bit more,” says Eggerue. I know I certainly could.
-Mashable